


Fringe Magic

by Gryffens



Category: Fringe, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-07
Updated: 2013-01-07
Packaged: 2017-11-24 01:33:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/628813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gryffens/pseuds/Gryffens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The thing that Peter missed most about his time overseas (more than sleeping through the night without Walter singing, more than the thrill of a con, more than the food and the abundance of sunny days) was that there, nobody cared what House he was in. "</p>
<p>The Fringe characters muse on House affiliation and character.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fringe Magic

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scratchingpost1](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scratchingpost1/gifts).



> Takes place after the events of the Harry Potter books. Fringe characters based on S1 but with some backstory that wasn't revealed until S2 & S3.

The thing that Peter missed most about his time overseas (more than sleeping through the night without Walter singing, more than the thrill of a con, more than the food and the abundance of sunny days) was that there, nobody cared what House he was in. It was absurd, utterly absurd, that the entirety of British Wizarding society was structured around the proclamations of a semi-sentient hat, made on the basis of the eleven year old psyche.

Out here in the adult world it didn’t work quite the way it did in school. If pressed, people would admit that of _course_ the stereotypes were too simplistic, that Hufflepuffs can be bright, Ravenclaws brave and so forth. Peter Pettigrew and Severus Snape could be cited as people who proved that house affiliation wasn’t destiny. But to Peter’s eyes, it was obvious - people found out he was a Slytherin, and they looked at him like they knew something about him, like that one label meant something, anything at all.

Peter knew that the fastest way to get yourself fooled was to see the label and not the person. Just look at Olivia – headstrong, brave, Gryffindor Olivia, who had no problem drawing him back to England through bluff, blackmail and underhanded manipulation. Back to England; back to his father, now freed from St Mungo’s and working at the Department of Mysteries, Merlin save us all.

 

***

 

Olivia never felt less Gryffindor than she did every year on her birthday, when her step-father’s owl swooped in her window.

She knew it was coming. It came every year, the tight ball of rage it left in her stomach never failing to appear as well. It was half the reason that she didn’t celebrate her birthday – the other half being her general disdain of parties, which could probably also be traced back to her childhood.

She wished her step-father had been a Muggle. Muggle post could be evaded, misdirected, hexed into oblivion the instant it crossed the threshold. A Howler wasn’t so easily dealt with, and no matter how angry she got she wasn’t going to take it out on the owl.

This year was simple. “THINKING OF YOU,” the letter intoned, and then crumbled into ash.

Olivia methodically spread marmalade over her toast, and just as methodically ate two slices. By the time she was finished her tea was cool enough to drink, so she did. Then she stood up, straightened her robes, and flooed in to work.

Her nine year old self would be raging right now, not comprehending how Olivia could continue to let herself be tortured by this man. Now that she was big enough, strong enough, smart enough to fight back, to hurt him and make him disappear forever, when the best her younger self could do was send him to St Mungo’s. Making her mother see reason, getting out of that man’s house had never been enough for younger Olivia. She thought that things would never be over until that bastard was dead.

Older, hopefully wiser Olivia didn’t believe that. What was done can’t be undone, and even his death wouldn’t erase the memories (or remove the spell damage to her left wrist). Or maybe she was just afraid, afraid that confronting him would undo all those years of training, leaving her once again a terrified child.

Olivia walked into Walter’s lab, automatically casting a Bubblehead charm when it turned out to be full of brightly coloured smoke. Peter and Astrid were already there, also wearing Bubblehead charms and looking bored. Walter was tucked in a corner, inhaling the fumes in obvious bliss. Olivia rolled her eyes and sat down at her desk.

Sitting there, protected by its own little charm, was a cupcake with red and yellow icing. Olivia looked up sharply, wondering who had left it there and what they meant by it. Astrid saw her looking, winked at her, then mimed zipping up her lips and throwing away the key. So Astrid knew it was her birthday, and had also worked out that she didn’t want to celebrate, so she wasn’t going to say anything to Walter and Peter. Huh.

Maybe, just this once, she could manage a bit of birthday cheer. (That’d show him.)

 

***

 

Astrid was the perfect assistant, almost the parody of a Hufflepuff. Anybody else would have upped and quit months ago, what with the long hours, unreasonable demands and the general lack of respect from Walter whenever he got into one of his ‘moods’. People had jokingly asked her why she stayed, and she would joke back or deflect the question. She hadn’t made up her mind yet what to do if someone asked her seriously – some of her thoughts on the subject weren’t exactly mainstream views in Wizarding Society.

See Astrid had a theory, about Houses and characters. She had come to see that Hufflepuff was different from the other Houses, and that there was a reason that the Sorting Hat could refer to Hufflepuffs as ‘the rest’ and not be entirely wrong. See bravery, cunning, intelligence – these were all, to some extent, innate traits. Loyalty and hard work, on the other hand – those could be _learnt_. All that was required to work hard was discipline, or else a strong sense of the necessity of the work. And what was a better motivation than loyalty? When someone is loyal to their peers it’s called friendship, while loyalty to a cause is called idealism, but it’s all the same thing really.

It was because of this that Pomona Sprout, and all the other Heads of Hufflepuff before her, could every year take a rag-tag bunch of eleven year olds and mould them into a unified house. Hufflepuffs were taught that being the butt of the school’s jokes only made standing up for each other more important, that not being as smart as a Ravenclaw just meant that you had to study harder, and that lofty ambition was meaningless without being willing to do the legwork to get to where you want to go. And Voldemort would have won if he understood even a fraction of what she understood by the time she was twelve.

Because Astrid knew loyalty, inside and out. She may not be the type that could inspire it, as a leader to followers, but she knew how to create it. She knew that if she hadn’t been here, the team of Peter, Walter and Olivia would have fallen apart long ago. There were things that they would do for each other, now, that they never would have done even a year ago.

So what if the Death Eaters had felt the same way? What if loyalty to the cause of a Pureblood Britain had survived Voldemort’s disappearance and later death? What if Walter’s earlier assistant had followed him where he wanted to go, instead of standing up for her beliefs? What would the world look like now?

Astrid knew that most of the other Hufflepuffs she knew didn’t think this way, that they saw loyalty as an inherently positive trait. Tempered with love, empathy and good judgement it almost always was, and Astrid had too much of the first two traits to ever consider deliberately manipulating loyalty for an evil goal. But good judgement? Sometimes she looked at what she was willing to do for Walter and she wondered.

Luckily today’s moral choices were far less complex, Astrid thought as she flipped through her recipes. Should she make lychee icing, or boysenberry?

 

***

 

Walter’s mind always wandered when he was brewing. Even as his fingers stripped leaves, chopped roots, crushed beetles, his thoughts roamed far and wide. In the old days he was always plotting new plots and dreaming new dreams. Now, he mostly remembered.

He remembered holding Peter in his arms when he was not even an hour old. He remembered sneaking behind the greenhouses with Elizabeth and getting caught by the Gryffindor Prefect. He remembered the joy of late night study sessions with William Bell. It had seemed so natural, Belly and him. William could run academic circles around his fellow Slytherins, and was looking for some intellectual challenge. Walter was tired of how his Ravenclaw housemates always looked to their books for knowledge when they could be looking at the world. Even then they both felt strongly they were meant for something greater, something vaster and more dazzling than any Wizard could grasp, even with all of their everyday wonders.

And so always the recollections of his happiest times contained within them the seed of his worst memories. The betrayed, desperate look in young Peter’s eyes, as he tried to crack the ice on Reiden Lake. Elizabeth’s body, her spirit fled beyond the reach of any magic. The monstrous results of his and Bell’s experiments, perversions of nature only stopped by deliberately crippling his own mind.

As he finished the potion and drew the first billows of smoke eagerly into his lungs, only one coherent thought remained; with all of his natural intellect, how could he have been so stupid?

 

***

 

Peter passed Hermione Granger in the corridors, muttering to herself in two distinct tones of voice. This was a fairly common sight ever since Hermione had found herself possessed by the shade of Severus Snape during a botched ritual. Peter liked Hermione, quite a lot actually, but the idea of a dinner date that included running commentary from the ex-Potion’s Master gave him the heebie-jeebies.

Peter turned the last corner on the way to Walter’s lab and stopped short. A gentle blue light was pulsing from under the door, signifying that the air purification charms were activated. Sighing, Peter cast a bubble-head charm on himself and walked into the room. Sure enough, a cauldron sitting in the corner was belching out purple smoke. It formed a thick cloud above Peter’s head that obscured the ceiling completely, but luckily below that the lab was mostly visible. Astrid was also sporting the head-in-a-fishbowl look. Walter was not, and by the blissed out look on his face, this was one of his more recreational potions. Olivia must have flooed in just after him, because she arrived just as he had gotten himself settled. She headed straight for her desk, which must mean they didn’t have a case yet. Probably just as well, considering that Walter was not currently residing on the same plane as the rest of them.

Peter suddenly wondered when this had become his life. Here he was, ex-conman, adventurer, free agent, sitting with two Aurors in the Department of Mysteries watching his father get high. For years the only times he had contact with law enforcement was during a scam or a shakedown (or sometimes both). Astrid and Olivia weren’t part of a scheme; they were his friends. As for Walter, the stubborn, infuriating, perplexing man had somehow crept back into Peter’s good graces when he wasn’t looking.

Peter had never felt ashamed of being a Slytherin, only annoyed at other people’s reactions. And even now, when day by day they are thrown into situations that cry out for courage, and teamwork, and quick-thinking; even now, Peter refused to believe that he had nothing to bring to the table. He was going to use every ounce of cunning in his body to keep his makeshift family out of trouble. And in the meantime he’d just watch as Olivia stayed two steps ahead of everyone, and Astrid cunningly snuck in cupcakes and Walter slowly learned to face up to his mistakes. Because House affiliation wasn’t everything, and he should know.


End file.
